Intel, Nvidia, AMD Lead a PC Graphics Market Poised for Growth

Intel again leads the graphics processor market, followed by Nvidia and AMD. Despite the ongoing legal dispute between Intel and Nvdia - which was recently stirred up - each showed first-quarter growth and is expected to have a strong year ahead.

Intel continued to lead a graphics market that is poised for
significant growth in 2010. While the 2009 PC graphics chip market
exceeded expectations, achieving 11 percent year-over-year growth, 2010
began with the expected seasonal slowdown, Jon Peddie Research reported
April 26. Still, the researcher has hopes for 2010, forecasting growth
of 17.3 percent, before settling down slightly to 16.9 percent growth
in 2011.
Intel
again led the market, growing its share to 45.49 percent during the
first quarter - up from 43.5 percent the quarter before, though down
from 51.1 percent a year earlier. JPR attributed the performance to
acceptance of Intel's "Clarkdale" processors - officially rolled out in January and quickly adopted by Fujitsu, among others - as well as ongoing Atom sales for netbooks.

Nvidia, in second place, jumped its market share from 31.5 percent in
the fourth quarter - and 26.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 - to
33 percent in the first quarter of 2010. On a quarter-to-quarter basis,
wrote JPR, "Nvidia gained in the notebook integrated, and discrete
segments, as well as the desktop integrated segment."

Come second-quarter results, Nvidia may show a boost from its relationship with Apple. In April, Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro line,
and several of the notebooks' major bragging points come thanks to
Nvidia's GeForce 320M processor, said to be the fastest on the market.

Third-place Advanced Micro Devices owned 25.15 percent of the market in
the first quarter, up from 24 percent during the last quarter and 21.7
percent a year ago. A fraction of the gain, wrote JPR, came from the
discrete desktop segment, while more than 4 percent came from
integrated notebooks.

Revenue for the quarter was reportedly $1.761 billion for Intel.
Nvidia, whose quarters straddle the calendar quarters, reported $982
million for its fourth quarter 2010, which ended in January. AMD's
first quarter revenue was $409 million, slipping slightly from its
fourth-quarter $427 million, though up from the $281 million a year ago.

Holding on to the ends of the graphics market are VIA/SE, with 0.71
percent market share for the first quarter, Sis, with 0.22 percent and
Matrox, with 0.06 percent.

JPR concluded that, in the fourth quarter of 2009, a new category, IPG
(integrated processor graphics), was introduced. "We will see the rapid
decline in deliveries for traditional chipset graphics or [integrated
graphics processors]," states the report. "However, for ease of
reporting, for now we're including these devices in our integrated
numbers."

Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.